Against Happiness

mortis? We wonder, then, if the obsession with happiness is, at the end of the day, a kind of unknowing necrophilia. We wonder if the desire for security is a hope for permanence, and we wonder if this hope for unchangeableness is a yen for death, the ultimate security blanket.

people with “something eating at them” are more interesting than those who are merely content.

The greatest tragedy is to live without tragedy.

Percy argues that most go through life witnessing not the actual world but their preconceptions of it.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least happy.

to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.

Through their exuberant melancholia, Adam and Eve indeed apprehended the difficult joys of earning redemption. Through their absence from literal Eden, they found the invisible Eden dwelling in their own hearts. Through their nakedness and solitude, they came to weave beautiful and attractive tapestries. Without their hunger for the sorrowful knowl

melancholy connects us to our fundamental being.

In contrast, melancholia (in my eyes) generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.